Insignificant Disasters
by AnimalDecay
Summary: After being uprooted and moving across the country more than once in his short life, Matthew Williams is left virtually alone to grow and discover himself, all the while dodging roadblocks that threaten to overcome him, and maybe finding something along the way that could make sticking it out to the end worth all the trouble. AU. Eventual Prucan and others. Full summary inside.
1. Chapter 1

**Title: Insignificant Disasters**

**Characters****:** Human AU. Main pairing is Prucan (which will come significantly later in the story) and most likely multiple side pairings.

**Rating: T** for now, but is subject to raise in later chapters.

**Disclaimer:** I own everything. Hahahahaha not. I wish.

**A/N:** Fair warning- this is gonna work a little bit differently than the other things I've done. First of all, updates will likely be hella slow because I won't have very much time to work, with all of the stuff I've got going on for school etc. But hopefully I'll retain interest, and hopefully you will too! Furthermore, show me you're interested! Review! Follow! Favorite! It keeps me motivated and makes me love you! And I think I'll leave it there for now. Happy reading!

* * *

We packed. In the oppressive dark of the hot, sticky twilight, we took clothes out of our drawers as quietly as we could- my brother, mom, and me- and put them in our suitcases. The suitcases went into the trunk of our old rusty blue station wagon, and we climbed into the tan vinyl seats ahead. As we packed, we couldn't see too well in the dark; light was only shining in through the windows facing our neighbors' porch. They were a family of party animals, always having friends over to drink and smoke with, and most of the time when it was hot and we kept the windows open we could smell the stale, sweet smell of marijuana and cheap beer. Their noise kept us up pretty often, too, but they weren't the reason we left King's Ridge Trailer Park that August.

We left because we didn't have any money. We were nearly broke and the little we did have my father gambled away. At the time, I was eight and a half years old- not really old enough to understand what was going on. But I doubt I would have anyway. King's Ridge was where all the poor people lived, so how could we be too poor to live even there, I would have wondered. And I did, later. But by then it was too late to ask; we were long gone- gone by years- and it really didn't matter anyway because then I knew.

As we got in the car my brother was crying. This surprised me- Alfred never cried. He was a year and five months older than me, and in my naïve childhood world, he was the bravest person in the universe. Once- in fact, that June just two months before we left- he had climbed up the big old tree that sat on the edge of the little community, right next to the highway. And as those sorts of things tend to go, he fell out on the first try. The damage was immediately visible- his hands and knees were both scraped up and bleeding, and he was pretty winded too, although that could've had more to do with shock. But even though I was crying and frantic at the sight of him, he just stood up and hobbled back to where our parents were sitting on the cheap plastic lawn chairs outside and told them he fell. The injuries weren't serious, but mom cleaned him up on the bathroom counter with the antibiotic that stung when it touched you. And he didn't even cry. He was my hero, in little ways like that.

But when we got in the car, just me and Alfred and our mom, tears were streaming down his cheeks and lips faster than he could wipe them away. Mom buckled my seatbelt for me and I asked her, as quietly as possible, why was Al crying? She didn't give me a straight answer.

"He'll be okay Matthew, honey."

Alfred apparently heard us and he hiccuped and defiantly declared that he _wasn't_ crying, _he_ wasn't a crybaby, but that wasn't fooling anyone. Mom went around to the other side of the car and got in the driver's seat and started the engine, and that's when I realized something was wrong.

Alfred, still sniffling, asked the same question I had:

"Mommy, where's daddy?"

And when she didn't answer Alfred cried harder and I started to cry too, but nobody said anything else. As we turned onto the interstate, I ended up falling asleep. I woke up a little stiff from leaning on the window and the digital clock on the dashboard said three thirty-four am. It was fast, I knew, but I didn't remember by how much. By then Alfred had long since fallen asleep too, and we were still driving. I looked out the window at the darkness of the passing farms and thought of our dad. I didn't have a terribly good sense of time, but figured he was probably still asleep. Did he know we were leaving? I wasn't sure. It wasn't for a long time that I knew what happened between our parents.

But then, still driving, passing the occasional house or group of them and my brain becoming exhausted with eight-year-old uncertainties, I drifted back off to sleep, and stayed that way for the rest of the night.

* * *

My mother, Alfred, and I ended up on the road for almost three days, traveling from King's Ridge just outside Cincinatti, Ohio, all the way to some nowhere place near the edge of Cody, Wyoming. It was near Yellowstone, and my mother promised us we would visit- maybe even get a season pass, she said, so we could go whenever we wanted. She promised we could see Old Faithful and hike the trails and maybe even see a buffalo. Alfred got really excited about that idea. In my head, I was thinking of all the ways we could get hurt by one.

As a kid I did stuff like that a lot. I worried about every sort of thing, from our parents getting mad about Al and I getting dirty while playing outside to catching colds from other people in big groups in the winter. It seemed like every little thing had a catch, that something relatively harmless could go horribly awry if it wasn't carefully monitored. My parents thought it was cute when they first started noticing it- they called it "Mattie's mothering", Alfred told me years later- but after a while it just got old. They figured I would grow out of it eventually, and because they said so, I did too.

August was in full swing when we got to Cody, and every morning Alfred would run into the tiny kitchen of the tiny house we were renting and ask about Yellowstone. He wanted that more than he had ever wanted most anything, I would guess. He loved adventures and stories of cowboys and Indians, and must have thought that this would be one of them. Mom would take us downtown every week or so and Alfred would go straight to the books about buffalo and geysers the like- anything remotely Yellowstone-related that he could get his hands on. I never knew what to get, so sometimes instead of looking at picture books or trailing behind Alfred and our mom, I would just sit on the bench next to the drinking fountains and wait for them to come back. It was strange, but seeing them walk towards me every time to come pick me up was sort of comforting, in it's own way. It was a constant in my life and there were so few of those that I couldn't stop myself from holding on tight to that one.

* * *

In the days we traveled- and then the following ones when we began to settle into this new environment- our mother tried to make life as normal as possible for us as she could manage. We did little things together like shop for groceries and go to the library, and Al and I would stay home when my mother went to work, after she'd found a job. She was a waitress at a restaurant in town, and most days she would walk to and from home to work because we didn't have money for gas. It was a long walk- a mile in either direction- and there were nights she would come home too tired to cook dinner for us, and Al and I would have the leftovers from the night before as she slept on the couch. We grew accustomed to it eventually, and a routine quietly slipped into place in the midst of our uprooted lives.

Our mother never mentioned our father, if she could help it. Alfred asked once about if he was coming, and all she said was no, and that she would tell us why when we were older. She must have thought she was protecting us, but it made me worry. Was it because of Alfred? He was always so rowdy- maybe dad didn't like him. But that seemed unlikely; I'd only ever seen them get along. So then I wondered if maybe it was my fault. That didn't seem entirely implausible. To this day I think he wanted another Alfred, someone loud and popular and outgoing and athletic- things I never was. And although I would eventually learn that it had nothing to do with either of us, the idea nagged me for a long, long time after it formed.

And a lot of ideas did.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Heyyyy I'm back! Sorry it took so long to update, but I've been really really busy and this chapter was a killer for some reason... I think slow updates will probably be a recurring theme here :/ But anyway, it's here now, up and running, so reviews/favorites/follows would be much appreciated! Happy reading!

* * *

August seemed to drag by, probably one of the slowest months I can remember. It was long and hot and our dad never once called. It wasn't that we expected him too, really, but I imagine that I'd half-hoped it anyway, in my childhood naïvety. Before we knew it, though, the slow, lazy days following our settlement into our new home gave way to the hectic time that marked the beginning of our first school year in Cody.

First and foremost, as usual, I worried. And it seemed there were so many things that required my attention. I'd done school before, of course- now going in to the third grade made me some kind of professional, I figured- but this, I knew, would be different. It was new sights and sounds and smells and, worst of all, people. I was cripplingly shy, especially being new, so the idea of having to go out and make new friends- a whole set of them!- was practically enough to send me over the edge in terror, come the first day of school.

I also worried about Alfred. That particular fear had much less rationale behind it than the nervousness I harbored for my own self. Alfred and I were practically polar opposites when it came to personality. Where I would find someone or something to hide behind upon encountering another human being, Alfred would be the one bravely providing the barrier. In my eyes, he was fearless, and I admit that more than once it made me jealous to see him playing on the playground with all of his friends at recess, especially because I would grow up, more often than not, standing alone by the school doors and waiting for the shrill bell to signify lunchtime. Despite all this, though, I worried about him anyway.

Predictably, come the first day of school, my concerns were proven completely unfounded. Alfred dressed in his favorite dirty old Ked's- which were a little bit too small for him now but mom helped him clean up the night before anyway- and striped polo shirt that made him look completely ready to fit in anywhere. And his demeanor said the same thing. So he bounced to the bus stop on the first day of his fourth grade adventure with a beaming smile on his face.

I, on the other hand, was neither bouncing nor smiling. In fact, I was really just trying my best not to cry as I clung tightly on to mom's hand for what I believed to be dear life. As the bus appeared over the horizon, making its way up the dry, dusty gravel road we lived on, the hand I trusted to keep me safe in this most perilous time suddenly disappeared.

At that point, trying harder than anything to suppress it, I really was expecting to cry, but at the very same moment my hand was caught up by another one- smaller than the last but still a bit bigger than mine- and swung around in a full circle by the attached human. It belonged, of course, to Alfred.

"Awe, c'mon Mattie! Don't worry about a thing! This is gonna be fun, okay? I'll even sit with you on the bus!"

Looking back at that moment, for all I would deny it as we both grew older, was a glaringly clear indication of just how perceptive Alfred was, even at that age. I had no idea then what it would mean for both of us in the future. In that particular moment, though, it didn't matter. Because Alfred was now going to guarantee that I wouldn't be alone for at least this one segment of our day.

Our mother, who was a little anxious in her own hurry to get to work that day, hugged us both quickly and placed brief a kiss on our cheeks, each one at a time, and then waved goodbye as she walked back down the alley to the old station wagon, that rusty blue beacon of my childhood that- as the bus pulled away with Alfred and I on it- filled me with a sudden and inexplicable longing for home. And I wasn't thinking of the one I had just walked out of, but rather of a home that I was unsure I would ever see or know again.

* * *

A long time in the future, when I was a good thirteen or fourteen years into my life and that station wagon had long since stopped working and everything in the world was a little older than it had ever been, I learned just exactly how we could afford to leave King's Ridge Trailer Park all those years before. As it turned out, we really couldn't- but even less could my parents afford their life the way things were. My father, a hopeless gambling addict (and apparently not a very good one, either), lost our money bit by bit as our mother tried in vain to win it back through real work. Though straining to both their pocket books and their marriage, my parents managed in this fashion for quite some time, until eventually the money just sort of ran out.

From there, the version of the story that I heard was abbreviated. It wasn't something my mom ever liked to talk about. What had ended up happening, to the best of my knowledge, was something along the lines of my mom taking what little money we had out of their bank account, and then stealing my father's credit card, taking us, and running out the door.

And Al and I didn't know it at the time, but when we left my dad and the trailer and King's Ridge, we wouldn't be seeing him ever again.

* * *

It was at the corner adjacent to the school's block- when the bus was coming to a lumbering halt at a red light before taking us the last hundred yards or so before we would be getting off and beginning our first day of school- that I felt a little bit of dread creep back into me. There were already quite a few children milling about outside the school as they got off their own buses, and it seemed as if they all had friends. My fears came in the form of lacking them. I mean, sure, I had Alfred as long as we were on the bus, but I also knew that we wouldn't be together for much longer. He was in the fourth grade, I in the third, and I knew what it meant: different teachers, different classmates, maybe even different lunchtimes.

It had never bothered me much, but now I was terrified. We both got off the bus, backpacks on shoulders and paper-bag lunches in hand, and immediately found ourselves thrown into a tumultuous crowd of other children. I stumbled at first, a little disoriented, until I found Al's hand and gripped onto it for dear life. To my right, I heard the voice of an adult yelling for fourth graders to go to her. As instructed, Alfred went. He pried his hand out of mine, told me he would see me on the bus going home, and then left. And then I was alone.

However anticlimactic, I did find my group soon enough, and made it through the rest of the day without too much incident. I also found that meeting people, while utterly terrifying, wasn't all that difficult when it came down it. Most likely, this was attributable to the fact that there were a few other kids in a similar boat as me. I ended up getting to know a boy who was almost as shy as I was- he did approach me first, though- and had mousy brown hair that hung down around his chin. His name, he told me, was Toris. After telling him my own, he sat down next to me at the table that was otherwise deserted. And like that, we became friends. How simple, how natural it was.

We were eight years old each and nearly alone. But for now, we had one another. And that was enough.


End file.
